This is wonderful. I'm writing a book[1] and it's in markdown and on github. The diffs look great for it:

https://github.com/munificent/game-programming-patterns/comm...

[1]: http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/

Word-diffs are great for prose; line-based diffs are completely opaque for editing. If you've ever looked at a lot of copyediting in a line-based diff, you have no idea what actually happened. Look at some edits on Wikipedia and imagine trying to view them in a default git log... Fortunately, you can use `diff --color-words` or a tool like `wdiff` to get better diffs. (An example: http://www.gwern.net/docs/2002-radiance#diff )

This is fantastic!

Version control is a killer feature for writers, particularly those working collaboratively.

There are actually already a few projects out there that offer version control for writers. Draft and Penflip come to mind.

Draft: https://draftin.com/

Penflip: https://www.penflip.com/

Ties in perfectly with the Git + file-based CMS approach as used by (one of many examples) Asana: http://eng.asana.com/2014/02/scaling-asana-com/ .

Cool feature!

some previous notes of mine on the display of prose diffs:

1. the general idea:

> http://zenmagiclove.com/phrase-change-display.html

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5639728

*

2. an example:

> http://zenmagiclove.com/phrase-change-sample.html

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5648071

*

3. a demo with the gettysburg address:

> http://zenmagiclove.com/misc/gabal/gabal.html

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6765685

*

i have working code, if github (or anyone else) is interested.

-bowerbird

Very cool, but only for markdown. :(

I guess I'll still have to run `scm-latexdiff` manually between commits. Still it's nice to see tools evolving beyound line diffs.

Well, sort of. It works for AsciiDoc, Textile, and all other formats supported by https://github.com/github/markup

Definitely cool, and it looks really pretty. I'm glad that github is going in the direction of "put all of your stuff here, not just code".

I'd love to see this for Fountain documents (http://fountain.io/).

Neat, I'll definitely use this with LaTeX.

Would it work with Latex? Doesn't Github have to supply the renderer itself?

I do not speak for GitHub, but anonymous sources inform me that the feature only works with prose formats that have a built-in renderer. So basically, if you can preview the file, you can get a rendered diff for it.

This seems to confirm your suggestion :-)

Any idea how they're doing this?